Here is a description of the program straight from their website: Audacity is a free audio editor. You can record sounds, play sounds, import and export WAV, AIFF, and MP3 files, and more. Use it to edit your sounds using Cut, Copy and Paste (with unlimited Undo), mix tracks together, or apply effects to your recordings. It also has a built-in amplitude envelope editor, a customizable spectrogram mode and a frequency analysis window for audio analysis applications. Built-in effects include Bass Boost, Wahwah, and Noise Removal, and it also supports VST plug-in effects.
Audacity 1.2.0-pre4 is a public test release of the free Audacity sound editor. This version fixes many minor bugs found in Audacity 1.2.0-pre3. This is a "release candidate" version. If no new bugs are found, we will release the new stable version 1.2.0 later this month.
Audacity 1.2.0-pre4 is available now for Windows and Linux. A new release for Mac OS X will be available after we fix some important bugs on that platform.
Changes in 1.2.0-pre4:
Fixed problems that could occur when importing
certain non-seekable PCM audio files, such as GSM610.
Fixed bug that was causing the samples to shift
off-screen horizonally when zoomed in very far and the track had a
time-shift offset.
Fixed bugs in the new resampler that added
noise to resampled audio on some systems. If you experienced noise when
exporting to a WAV, MP3 or OGG file you may have been bitten by this
bug.
Fixed bug that led to occasional crashes when
using the time-shift tool in conjunction with high zoom factors.
Dithering is now only applied on export when it
is really necessary (e.g. when converting float samples to 16-bit).
Files that only contain mono tracks are now
automatically exported to stereo files when they contain tracks which
are panned to the left or the right.
The Delete key can now be used to delete the
current selection, in addition to the Backspace key.
Fixed bug where Audacity didn't ask whether to save changes if you close the project or exit
while recording.
Mac OS X: Supports Playthrough (listen to what
you're recording while recording it) if your hardware device supports
it.
Mac OS X: Audacity is now a package (you can
right-click on Audacity.app and select 'Show Package Contents').
Launch time has improved significantly.
MS Windows: Fixed problem that caused Windows
XP to use the short name of a file ("TESTFI~1.AUP"), which led to
problems when the file was later opened again using the long file name.
MS Windows: Fixed bug that caused file exports
to fail if the destination directory was the root folder of a Windows
drive.
MS Windows: Audacity's application information which is written to the Windows registry now
always contains the full path to the executable.
MS Windows: Fixed problems in trying to set the
Windows registry as non-admin user, for file-type associations.
Make sure the "Save" command is enabled after
changing gain and pan sliders.
Updated translations. Added translator credits to localized versions of Audacity.
Audacity is being developed by a team of volunteers under the open-source model. It is written in C and C++, using the wxWindows cross-platform toolkit. All of the source code to the program is made available under the GNU General Public License, which essentially allows anyone to modify the source code as long as they publicize the changes. The code is hosted on SourceForge.
You can learn more about Audacity by visiting this webpage. There you will also find a download. The Windows version in 2.7 megabytes. There is also a Mac OSX pre3 version there as well. Bear in mind this is still in beta but, it is getting close to completion.
